Friday, August 31, 2012

In Craig Zobel’s terrifically executed new film Compliance, Sandra, the manager at an
Ohio fast food outlet, gets a call from a police officer, accusing one of her
employees, Becky, of theft, apparently corroborated by surveillance footage.
With his arrival delayed by other demands, he asks Sandra to detain the
employee, to interrogate her, to search her. Sandra’s hesitant, but since the
officer confirms he’s already cleared the approach higher up the corporate
chain, and since his command of the situation is self-evident, she goes along,
and since Becky’s just a scared young woman who needs her job, she submits.
It’s a busy Friday night, and the staff is stretched, so as the detention
stretches on, and the officer’s arrival is further delayed, Sandra is forced to
involve other employees, and then even her fiancee. But the film shows us early
on that the officer isn’t who he claims – it’s a prank, a sick manipulation, an
exploitation of human gullibility and submissiveness.

Walking out

The film has been somewhat controversial, with reports
of people shouting at the screen or walking out – indeed, when I saw it at the
Lightbox, I think four people left (a lot, in percentage terms). The issue
seems to be that the exploitation of Becky exceeds what a viewer should be
expected to submit to, although analyzed as a censor would do, by exposed
private parts and what you see them doing, Zobel seems correct in saying “You have the impression that you're seeing more nudity
than you actually do.” Anyway, this tells you the movie works well enough as an
effectively creepy thriller, fully exploiting the easy identifiability of the
premise, and one can easily imagine how someone like Brian de Palma might have
pumped up the eroticism and displaced voyuerism, to make something more overtly
“Hitchcockian” out of it.

Zobel has
something different in mind though, and positions the film more as a social
phenomenon (one based closely on documented real-life cases), with almost
limitless metaphorical potential. In broad terms, the way Sandra and others so
easily submit to the caller’s claim of authority seems to speak to a broader
capitulation in America culture. In its first section, setting up the
characters and the location, Zobel evokes the fast food joint with great
finesse, establishing the economic needs of the characters, and the
generational differences that separate Sandra from her employees and later
assist in driving a wedge between them. He doesn’t hammer the point – this
isn’t a sequel to Fast Food Nation –
but he doesn’t need to: no matter how they might tweak their images, such
chains embody better than any other commercial enterprise the sickness at the
heart of the West, perpetuating countless interlocking cycles of low wages and
high profits, ill-health and spiritual deadening, and ultimately a kind of
quiet terror, which increasingly reveals itself as Compliance progresses.

Middle America

I found myself
thinking for instance of how Barack Obama was hammered four years ago for
talking about small towns where “the
jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them” and going on:
“and it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion
or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or
anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Although it
certainly sounds elitist, and perhaps doesn’t display much sensitivity to
variations in culture and tradition, the basic point seems incontrovertible to
me – that people place too much importance on things that ought to be
tangential to them and (to extend Obama’s point) that this confused value
system makes them ripe for being
persistently duped by their rulers, into acting and voting calamitously against
their own self-interests.

I should acknowledge
that Zobel wouldn’t necessarily endorse that analysis: in the interviews I’ve
seen, he seems to cast the film as an examination of human nature – of how, “in
order to have a pleasant life, you have to be able to trust that people are who
they say they are” – rather than a political statement. Quoting someone who saw
the film as a portrayal of “Middle America,” he says “I think that's an inherently distancing and, honestly,
condescending, way to look at it.” As such, the film starts to remind you of
one of the old-time Hollywood creations which support endless reverie and
analysis, regardless of whether their directors would have endorsed any of it
(as a viewing experience though, with its intense focus on faces and
interactions and its careful evocation of place and texture, it’s more
reminiscent of the 70’s, reminding you – not that a reminder was needed - of
how frothy and tiresome much of cinema seems now).

Disquiet of doubt

A recent New York Times column by Frank Bruni
demonstrates further the film’s metaphorical reach, roping in additional
touchpoints of American malaise: “People also
routinely elect trust over skepticism because it’s easier, more convenient.
Saddam Hussein is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction; the climate isn’t
changing; Barack Obama’s birth certificate is forged; Mitt Romney didn’t pay
taxes for 10 years. To varying degrees, all of these were or are articles of
faith, unverifiable or eventually knocked down. People nonetheless accepted
them because the alternative meant confronting outright mendacity from
otherwise respected authorities, trading the calm of certainty for the disquiet
of doubt.”

Is there any
silver lining in all this? Only perhaps that the character that finally brings
it all to a halt is the film’s most obvious archetype, whose grizzled reaction
of intuitive revulsion and refusal embodies the way Americans like to picture themselves,
regardless that it’s increasingly a marginalized stereotype. But Zobel allows
no sense of triumph, muddying the waters further in an intriguing series of
final scenes, which allow some traditional narrative closure while cementing
the sense of unbridgeable gulfs and shortfalls.

Even the title
carries a bit of extra resonance, if you’ve worked in the financial industry as
I have – for example, the Ontario Securities Commission has a “director of
compliance and registrant regulation,” and there’s a prominent publication and
website called “Compliance Week.” But of course, compliance – in the sense of
obeying a bunch of rules – isn’t necessarily the same as (and may sometimes
even be a smokescreen for having failed at) building an ethical culture. In the
same way, the film’s portrayal early on of the prevailing rules for closing the
freezer door, maintaining the food assembly line and so on tells us nothing
about the quality or virtue of the food or of the organization; they’re
rituals, of the sort that clog up our lives – and if they leave any element of
our lives that’s not clogged up, then
the media companies happily do all they can to clog up the rest.

Compliance
isn’t a perfect film – if anything, I’d argue it should make its viewers even
more uncomfortable in parts – but when a picture is this provocative, and so
mentally bracing and useful, you’re
more than happy to take it as it is.

Sunday, August 26, 2012

This is the fourth of Jack Hughes’
reports from the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.

Le
temps qui reste (Francois Ozon)

Ozon’s 5 X2, rather to my surprise, was one of
my favourite films at last year’s festival. It’s the story of a relationship
told in five sequences, the structural innovation being that they run in
reverse order. The film’s intrigue is in Ozon’s near-incredulity at the
possibility that such relationships might exist at all, and in how he
consequently renders events calmly but ineluctably strange; among other things,
it may have provided last year’s most astringently gay perspective on a
predominantly straight world (Pedro Almodovar’s Bad Education, although much more widely praised, seemed to me
merely gauche by comparison).

Ozon has
seemed for a while to be aiming for the top of the heap of European directors.
He’s extremely variable and resourceful, moving from the black comedy of Sitcom to the hermetic Fassbinder
tribute Water Falls On Burning Rocks
to the allusive and mysterious Under The
Sand to the contrived delight of 8
Women. Somehow his work nevertheless seems to be all of a piece, held
together by a wry skepticism at bourgeois assumptions. His new film Le Temps qui reste demonstrates all his
proficiency, but is probably only a minor addition to the canon. It’s about an
abrasive young photographer who receives a diagnosis of terminal cancer,
decides to forego treatment, and spends his remaining time sifting the elements
of his life – he breaks up with his boyfriend, reconciles with his sister, pays
a touching visit to his grandmother, and so forth. There’s also a somewhat
bizarre out-of-nowhere plotline that serves to reconcile his ambivalent view of
his own childhood, and to deliver him to an ultimate state of benevolence and
acceptance.

The film has some of Ozon’s most
overt homosexual content, but he’s content on this occasion to work within
familiar ideological and emotional structures – the character’s personal
journey is conventional, and the film is accessibly even-toned.None of this undermines its emotional impact
– scene by scene, it’s exceptionally well judged. But I saw it the day after
watching a pair of other French films - Gentille
and Un couple parfait – that
provided, between the two of them, as much enjoyment but a higher dose of
subtle subversion and technical provocation. By comparison, Ozon’s film simply
seemed minor. He’s so smart though that this is probably part of a deliberate
strategy, to establish his mastery of all points on the spectrum: his next film
will probably kick us hard, where it hurts.

Lie
With Me (Clement Virgo)

Virgo’s film was preceded by
advance buzz about its daring- the
programme book calls it a “distaff version of Last Tango In Paris”. It follows a young Toronto woman through a
series of sexual encounters (linked by instantly forgettable other stuff),
eventually focusing on her fraught relationship with a particular guy. The
movie is shot in a ramshackle, drifting, close-up style, and this is
occasionally successful in complementing the protagonist’s turbulent psyche –
it also benefits immeasurably from the fearless central performance by Lauren
Lee Smith. But on the whole it’s a superficial thing, unable to put these
elements to any even quasi-profound purpose. The character’s inner thoughts,
captured in voice over, are somewhat less than revelatory – for example: “I
didn’t know how to love him. All I knew what to do was f***. It’s not enough to
f***.” As for the sex, it’s at least more convincing than anything in Atom
Egoyan’s new movie, but not very interesting for anyone aware of recent trends
in European films. The movie does however attain a certain distinction from
setting these goings-on against such familiar settings as Dundas Square and the
Annex, which serve as compelling insurance against viewing any of it as being
remotely glamorous.

06/05:
The Sixth Of May (Theo van Gogh)

Theo van Gogh achieved his
greatest fame in death, when he was shot in Amsterdam last year, apparently in
response to numerous provocative statements on Islam. His films were not well
known outside the Netherlands – I had only seen one of them, and it wasn’t at
all memorable (I do recall it had something to do with phone sex). His last
film takes off from the other high profile Dutch shooting of recent times –
Presidential candidate Pim Fortuyn, who was killed in 2002, ten days before he
might well have won the election. The film posits that a photographer,
happening to be close to the scene, starts to string things together in All The President’s Men style, although
(this being thirty years later) with more technological panache. Events move
along zippily enough, but I will confess to not following all of the links, nor
even fully comprehending where matters end up. I don’t think this is just my
problem either – there’s not much sign that Van Gogh had his eye on an international
audience here, and in any event his direction is fairly run-of-the-mill. There
seems to be a vague attempt to embody some of Fortuyn’s signature issues and
complexities in the narrative; for example, the anti-immigration stance
inherent in his declaration that “Holland is full,” modified by his distance
from the far right that’s generally associated with such stances, is echoed here
in several inter-racial relationships, and perhaps also (maybe more
insidiously) in the deceptions engineered by one of the immigrant characters.
Intriguing as that is though, it’s far less resonant than any of the footage of
Fortuyn that’s interspersed through the film.

All
Souls (numerous directors)

Van Gogh’s death itself gave rise
to a festival film, a compilation of short segments by 17 Dutch filmmakers, all
linked more or less explicitly (for a non-Dutch viewer it’s not always easy to
know which) to his murder on November 2, 2004 (coincidentally, but with a
macabre artistic utility, the date of the last US election). As with most
exercises of this kind, the approaches vary widely, from symbolic fantasy to
erotic reverie to documentary to faux documentary to absurdist comedy to gentle
observation to impressionistic collage; the most common theme is the difficulty
of accommodating diversity and accepting societal evolution, without inhibiting
free speech and while accommodating “tradition” (at least partly a xenophobic
construct). The quality, in truth, averages out at the lower end of the
spectrum – in particular, this isn’t much of a showcase for the Dutch sense of
humour, although the best sequence, an evocation of an Amsterdam terrorized by
a mysterious cloud, yields the punch line (an effective one, in context) that
it was all caused by an old woman emptying her vacuum cleaner bag off her
apartment balcony. Highs and lows aside, the film ably communicates the immense
trauma of the event; it’s not analytical so much as bereft and woebegone,
circling round Van Gogh’s departed spirit as if in the forlorn hope of
effecting his return.

Saturday, August 11, 2012

Billy Wilder’s Some Like it Hot is an American classic,
placed at number one on the American Film Institute’s list of the funniest
American movies (number two was Tootsie,
with which it has some obvious similarities), and voted among the best films
ever made in various other polls. I saw the film again recently, after a long
absence from it, and felt again that its status is a bit overblown. When I use
this space to write about non-current movies, it’s usually to illuminate the
under-appreciated, not to throw stones at beloved artifacts. But then,
defending our beloved artifacts only deepens our love for them. So take this as
my constructive gift to Some Like it Hot
fans.

Nobody’s perfect

The film follows
two jazz musicians who witness the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre and take
the only available route out of Chicago: going in drag and joining an
all-girl’s band en route to Florida. Joe falls for the singer, Sugar Kane, and
makes moves on her at the resort in the guise of a millionaire oil heir,
disguised this time behind a thick pair of glasses and a Cary Grant
impersonation; Jerry finds himself pursued by a kooky real-life millionaire.
Eventually the gangsters turn up in Florida, but the two couples get away, with
the classic closing line when the kook discovers Jerry is actually a man:
“Nobody’s perfect” (number forty-eight in the AFI’s list of top movie quotes).

The movie is a
masterpiece of pace and structure. It starts with some artful misdirection,
allowing us to think we might be watching a gangster movie; the top-billed
Sugar doesn’t turn up for the first half hour or so. It’s crammed with
one-liners and conceptual flourishes, but by modern standards allows its key
characters lots of breathing space; when it cranks up the pace for the home
stretch, it almost assumes an air of blissful stream of consciousness (how do
the guys, under hot pursuit, change back so quickly into their female
disguises? Who cares!). It has great black and white photography, as polished
as onyx and silver. And above all perhaps, it has Marilyn Monroe, in one of her
most iconic roles, a little heavier than the studio wanted (and quite a bit
heavier than present-day conventions would allow) but beautiful and tender, and
performing some of her best-known musical numbers, in particular “I Wanna be
Loved by You.” It’s probably as easy to watch as any film could be.

So why the
reservations? Partly because much of its impact depends on simplifications
which, although constituting reasonable applications of suspended disbelief at
the time of its production, now seem rather grotesque. Most of these involve,
inevitably, sex. That famous last line speaks to a libido so over-charged, it’s
lost track of the basics, making any rational human interaction implausible
(and, it seems, making any meaningful physicality unthinkable). The movie pulls
Jerry into a similar vortex: his head initially spins from the intimate access
to scantily-clad women, but when the millionaire proposes to him, he succumbs
entirely to the notion that he might get married, with Joe having to forcibly
remind him he’s a boy. This doesn’t make any psychological sense of course,
especially since Joe never exhibits the slightest gender confusion. This might
sound like too heavy a hammer to apply, but I can’t help thinking in contrast
of how the richest Hollywood films - like many of Howard Hawks’ for instance -
remain emotionally plausible and moving, despite their heavy stylization and
the limitations of the time.

Jack Lemmon

The film’s
portrayal of Jerry is actually quite mean-spirited. Their relationship at the
start is one of those inexplicable double-acts where they seem to operate as de
facto life partners, making all major decisions collectively, even though Joe
basically abuses and manipulates him. Hawks uses structures like this too, in Only Angels Have Wings for instance, but
his films always convey a sense of an intricate and inherently balanced social
system, responding to each member’s inherent strength and weakness and moral
resources. In Some Like it Hot, Jerry
just seems like a loser who keeps getting duped, and there’s something rather
cruel in how he’s the first of the two to set his sights on Sugar, only to be
shoved aside when Joe focuses in the same direction.

Jack Lemmon plays
Jerry, and I’ll tell you, I love Jack Lemmon, he’s one of the few actors who
influences my movie choices (I recently chose to watch Under the Yum Yum Tree – what more do you need to know?) but this
is just about my least favourite of his major performances. I know that’s odd;
for a lot of people it’s the opposite. But his “Daphne” is a gargoyle,
tittering and screeching; to say the least, it’s an unsophisticated approach to
the character. Lemmon’s great strength as an actor, I think, was in embodying
the impossible weight of conformity – time and time again he showed how the
business suit barely stays on for all the tics and anxieties and excess booze. Some Like it Hot hints at that theme –
how could his sexuality be so fluid if his ego wasn’t basically a wreck? – but
it’s patently not what the film is about. Tony Curtis as Joe does more with
less, but once again the winner is Hawks, for I Was a Male War Bride, coincidentally with Cary Grant.

Billy Wilder

None of this
should suggest I dislike Billy Wilder’s work, although I guess I’m cooler about
it than The Artist’s Michel
Hazanavicius, who calls Wilder the “perfect director” and thanked him three
times in his Oscar acceptance speech. I tend to prefer the older Wilder,
loosening up the pace a bit and taking advantage of more relaxed standards in
films like The Private Life of Sherlock
Holmes and, especially, Avanti!
As for peak-period, firing-on-all-cylinders Wilder, I’d go instead for One Two Three with James Cagney, an even
faster-paced, higher-functioning machine, built around a Coke executive in West
Berlin. An interesting thing though – the plot turns in large part on a
Communist rabble-rouser who Cagney through force of will (and lots of shouting)
remakes in no time at all into an immaculate pin-striped capitalist, a
transformation not so far removed from Jerry’s instant inner metamorphosis into
a woman. You could view that as a wisely cynical view of human integrity, or as
plausibility sacrificed for narrative contingency, papered over by dazzling
speed and facility (his late curio Fedora
takes the device to its extreme, revolving around the substitution of one
person for another – the difference is that Fedora
illustrates greater empathy for the psychic toll on the victim).

But maybe this all
only means that some, including me, don’t really like it hot, because they
can’t take it hot…

This is the third
of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.

Three Times (Hou
Hsiao-hsien)

In my preview
article I said that this film by Taiwanese director Hou might be the prime
event of the festival, and it may well have lived up to that expectation. It’s
made up of three episodes, each starring the same two actors. The first, set in
the 1960’s, is a delicate examination of the gradually established love between
two young people in sparse circumstances. In the second, in 1910, the setting
is a high-class brothel, for an equally well-observed study of emotions, but
carrying a more fragmented outcome; this episode is filmed silently, with
intertitles, which is both an experiment in cinematic form and an evocation of
the restraint of the age. In the third story, set in present day Taipei (among
so much else, the film tracks Taiwan’s growing urbanization), cell phones and
text messages have replaced letters; the content of what’s conveyed has become
transient and disposable; and the relationships themselves have become coarse-edged
and self-serving (when the conversation is silent in this episode, it’s because
it’s drowned out by loud music). The film might thus have been designed largely
to show up contemporary society, but Hou’s approach is too nuanced to traffic
in easy attitudinizing. Three Times
is full of parallels and echoes, and is exquisitely constructed and
manufactured; the overall trajectory of each story is clear, but each retains
considerable mystery; each forms a mini social critique of the times. After
this and his last film Cafe Lumiere,
it seems possible that Hou is stripping down his film’s complexities and
becoming more purely a humanist, albeit a very specifically Taiwanese one, and
this should surely cause his audience and popular stature to increase, although
to the extent that this ultimately renders him more conventional, there is
something to regret in the evolution too.

Why We Fight (Eugene
Jarecki)

In his final
Presidential speech in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower chose to focus not on patriotic
platitudes, but on a specific and pointed warning about the US
military-industrial complex, and on the crucial role of an “alert and
responsible citizenry” in tempering its potentially reckless evolution. Forty
years later, all of Eisenhower’s presumed fears have been realized: an out of
control military budget directed through cozy if not wantonly corrupt
political-corporate affiliations; complacent media; an ideologically-driven,
arrogant administration (especially post 9/11) that launches a war of such hazy
rationale and stated benefits that you ask ten people what it’s all for and get
ten different answers. Jarecki’s hard-hitting, enormously effective documentary
sets out all of this in straightforward nuts-and-bolts terms. It’s obviously a
spiritual cousin to Fahrenheit 911,
but with a total absence of showboating. Among the possible objections to it
are, well, a lack of balance (although I’m only throwing that one out in my own
attempt at balance) and perhaps a little too much time spent on the personal
testimony of a retired cop who lost a son on 9/11, supported the war in Iraq to
the extent of petitioning the Army to have his son’s name painted on the side
of a bomb, and then suffered a cataclysmic meltdown of faith as the official
story crashed and burned. The film’s final grim reckoning is spoken by one of
the bewildered Iraqis: “America will lose because its behaviour is not the
behaviour of a great nation.”

Delicate Crime (Beto
Brant)

This Brazilian
film was one of my wild card selections – I went into it not even remembering
the programme book synopsis.It’s a work
of art of a kind that reminds you how easy and ingratiating even the more
‘demanding’ films can be. Initially it seems to be about a theatre critic – a
man “who has always lived life in the third person” – and his faltering
relationship with the off-stage world, but it slowly shifts its focus to a
one-legged woman with whom he falls in love, and the artist who uses her as a
model. The film reflects on the relative ethics of physical and artistic
violation, and the degree to which the motives and self-exposure (physical,
emotional, aesthetic) of the perpetrator might condition one’s judgment of the
action. Ultimately art surpasses life in the film’s scheme to the degree that
it sees no need to resolve the critic’s story – he is last seen lost in a stark
process beyond his control, while the model attains a nobility that initially
appeared impossible. The film feels a little academic at times, but on the
whole I count it as one of those classic, unexpected festival discoveries.

Takeshis’ (Takeshi Kitano)

In that same
preview article I said that Takeshis’
“sounds potentially self-indulgent, but should at least be highly entertaining
about it.” I’d say that was just about right again. This is Kitano’s 8 1/2, with the star playing both
himself and a guy behind a grocery store counter who wants to be an actor. The
movie goes off in all directions, with dream sequences within dream sequences
within dream sequences, at times dizzily surreal, and at others seeming rather
beautiful in how it strips conventional plot mechanics down to an absurdly
elemental framework. Apart from Fellini, it at various points evokes Godard for
its relentless deconstruction, and David Lynch (for a bunch of stuff I don’t
know how to explain). The film is not really a great advance for Kitano after Dolls and Zatoichi (at various points, it’s like watching bits of those
movies again, along with bits of everything else he’s ever made) – it has the
air of something he wanted to get out of his system, and although it’s formally
very interesting, and admirable for its pace and tenacity, I’d be very
surprised if it had an independent commercial life ahead of it here.

Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic (Liam Lynch)

I am not much of a
stand-up comedy fan, but even so I don’t mean it as faint praise when I say
that this recording of a show by comedian Sarah Silverman is probably the best
thing I’ve seen in the genre. Silverman ploughs the old “Is there anyone I
haven’t insulted” furrow, gliding through just about every available racial,
sexual and societal taboo, while nevertheless managing still to come across as
a generally nice Jewish girl, and weaving in shots at so many clichéd
middle-class attitudes and responses that at the end you’ll wonder whether
there’s anything left for her to cover. I would give you an example, but
virtually nothing she says can be printed here, and anyway it’s at least 80% in
the delivery. The film lasts only 73 minutes in total, about 20% of which pads
out the main show with musical and other inserts of variable quality. Like so
many others, Silverman has often been stuck in dull mainstream roles (a recent
one was the roommate’s girlfriend in School
Of Rock), although she had one of the more intriguing snippets in The Aristocrats, but come what may, this
should ensure her spiky/vulnerable genius a place in the hall of fame.

Every ten years
since 1952, the British film magazine Sight
and Sound has polled critics and historians on the best films of all time.
I’m pretty sure this used to be of limited interest to anyone other than Sight and Sound readers (a small group,
needless to say), but given changing times, the Internet was all over this
year’s iteration (the results of which, for instance, were live-tweeted). Orson
Welles’ Citizen Kane had been in
first place since 1962, but I think most people expected a change, and so it
came to pass: the quasi-official best film of all time is now Alfred
Hitchcock’s Vertigo (which was second
last time). Here’s the entire top ten: Vertigo,
Citizen Kane, Tokyo Story (Ozu), La
Regle du jeu (Renoir), Sunrise
(Murnau), 2001: a Space Odyssey
(Kubrick), The Searchers (Ford), Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov), The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer), 8 ½ (Fellini).

No Play Time

Naturally, there
were as many reactions to this as there were people reacting. My own reaction
was that apart from some internal shuffling, the list was surprisingly similar
to last time: seven of the ten were unchanged and two of the new entries had
been on the top ten in past decades, the only “new” entry is Man with a Movie Camera, made in 1928!
Having said that, I couldn’t have thought of too many other films that seemed
likely to make it up there. If I’d had to make a guess, I might have put some
money on Jacques Tati’s 1967 film Play
Time, but that was at number 42, so I was way off.

And yet, maybe not
so far off. Play Time received 31
votes, which sounds meagre when you know that 846 people voted (each submitting
a list of ten). But the tenth film, 8 ½,
only received 64 votes, and Vertigo
took the crown with 191 votes, representing just 22% of the participants. So
there’s really little consensus here on anything, beyond the enormous depth and
richness of cinema history – over 2,000 films received at least one vote.

Of course, I’m far
too minor a figure to have participated, but I played with this subject in an
article a couple of years ago. Although I’m sure the list I came up with would
change every time I thought of it (I’m not sure how I left Rivette and Bresson
off there, other than just the hellish constraint of keeping it at ten), this
is still a pretty good snapshot of my view of things: F For Fake (Welles, 1973), The King of
Comedy (Scorsese, 1982), Late
Spring (Ozu, 1949), Love Streams
(Cassavetes, 1984), My Night At Maud’s
(Rohmer, 1969), My Sex Life…or How I Got
Into an Argument (Desplechin, 1996 – this is my sole pick that really goes
out on a big limb), The Passenger
(Antonioni, 1975), Play Time, That
Obscure Object of Desire (Bunuel, 1977), The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Demy, 1964). Of those, Late
Spring was number 15 in the new poll, and Play Time as I mentioned was at 42; the others just got a handful
of votes, if any. But lots of voters were far more iconoclastic than I would
have been. After all, my list illustrates one of the insurmountable problems –
I probably wouldn’t have voted for Citizen
Kane, but only because of another Welles film I like even more. From a
tactical point of view, list-wise, it’s way better for a director to have
one preeminent achievement than to divide admirers between too many
masterpieces.

Vertigo versus Kane

So it basically seems hopeless to me to probe the list for any
broad meaning. Still, as I mentioned, all kinds of people had a good time with
it. For example, Aisha Harris in Slate
advanced three theories: that “Vertigo can be seen as more
closely aligned with today’s cultural climate than Citizen Kane’s largely male-centric realm,” that
“any overwhelmingly lauded figure or work of art is going to eventually face
backlash,” and that “while Welles’ classic is technically innovative, it rings
hollow emotionally.” But this all implies a much more conscious and unified
judging process than actually existed, as if Vertigo and Kane were
facing off before the Supreme Court. Actually, given the expanded voting pool, Kane received more votes than last time,
regardless that Vertigo received even
more more votes. Elsewhere on the Slate website, Alyssa Rosenberg noted
the absence of female directors and opined: “women directors are working in
genres that are simply never given the same critical respect as male-dominated
genres…Nora Ephron's best movies may live in the hearts of audiences forever,
but I'd be surprised to see the Sight
& Sound critics give her space on their ballots.” Well, there are
plenty of reasons why Sleepless in
Seattle didn’t make the list, but gender-driven snobbery isn’t one of them:
Avatar, The Dark Knight Returns and Porky’s didn’t make it either.

Which makes the point that although voters were
allowed to apply any criteria they wanted, the group wouldn’t have put much
emphasis on popular acceptance. I find everything in the top ten completely
entertaining, in the sense that watching them is a completely enveloping and
satisfying experience, but I’m not sure that was true for all of them on first
viewing. As reactions to The Artist
illustrated, silent cinema – which encompasses Sunrise, Man with a Movie Camera, and Passion of Joan of Arc - is unknown territory for many. Ozu is one
of my favourite directors, but it takes time to ease into his worldview. Even Vertigo used to be widely regarded as
one of Hitchcock’s lesser films (judged purely as a narrative machine, it might
seem to dawdle) and I can imagine many viewers being rather mystified by it.
But if you have any inclination to acclimatize yourself to cinema as art, and
time to seek out writers and commentators who can facilitate your reactions,
these ten films form a terrific place to start.

Wonderful Times

In one sense at least, we’re living in wonderful
times: when I first became aware of this exercise around 1982, the listed films
were just names – unless they happened to turn up on TV (and most of them
wouldn’t), you could only dream of them. But this time, I already had eight of
the ten on DVD, and I’d watched a ninth just a few months earlier on cable;
this prompted me to order the odd one out (Man
with a Movie Camera – and even then, it’s not so long since I saw it); I owned
thirty-five of the top fifty, and I don’t believe any of the fifty is
unavailable. Really, for people who love cinema, this poll might provide enough
new ideas and intentions and desires to rewrite their schedule for the rest of
the year.

This is the second
of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2005 Toronto Film Festival.

Water (Deepa Mehta)

This was the
opening Gala this year, beating out the new Egoyan and Cronenberg entries. It’s
the third film in Mehta’s “Elemental Trilogy” – the previous two were Fire and Earth, neither of which left any impression on me at all. Since
then she’s made Bollywood Hollywood,
a truly terrible film, and the unappreciated The Republic Of Love(which
I didn’t see). Water is about the
mistreatment of women in 1940’s India, first married off at startlingly young
ages, and then – when their husbands die on them –internally banished to an
ashram for widows; based on what’s shown here, the only practical role men
might ever allow a widow to fill is that of whore. This is all rooted in Hindu
dogma, but as one character says, disguised as religion, it’s just about
money...having one less mouth to feed.

It’s powerful
material, and makes for Mehta’s best film. She went through a lot to make it.
The film originally started production in 2000 in India, but filming was shut
down after mass protests; the director received death threats and was burned in
effigy (it was ultimately shot in Sri Lanka).Still, respect for Mehta’s commitment cannot dismiss the fact that the
film is still significantly flawed by her excessively linear sensibility.
Bizarre as this might sound from any synopsis of the plot, it often feels
somewhat sugarcoated, with a sappily portrayed love affair powering much of the
plot mechanics. It has some moments of considerable tragedy, but Mehta doesn’t
bring much tonal variation to events, blunting their impact both as drama and –
more significantly – as politics. The cameo at the end by an actor playing
Gandhi also seemed to me rather fanciful. It’s a handsome and engrossing work,
not unworthy of its high-profile status, but it’s hard to align oneself
wholeheartedly with the general wild enthusiasm it’s received.

The Well (Kristian Petri)

I subscribe to the
critical orthodoxy on Orson Welles’ Citizen
Kane – it’s one of my favourite films. As everyone says, it has immense
stylistic imagination and confidence and always seems boundlessly energetic,
but there’s something almost supernatural to its scope – it’s more closely
rooted (we now know) in Welles’ own psyche and destiny than he could possibly
have appreciated at the time, and performs a more effective biopsy on a certain
strand of 20th century culture than a young man should have been
capable of. Whenever I watch the aging Kane stagnating in his vast collection
of artifacts, his youthful exuberance collapsing into helpless intransigence, I
can’t help thinking of Welles’ subsequent career; with its countless unfinished
projects and restless shifts of focus, his unquestionable air of majesty,
figuratively and physically over spilling all normal boundaries, toppling over
(often knowingly, it seems) into bitter comedy. The imagery of artistic and
personal gluttony hangs heavily over him, but to see him only in those terms
obscures the delicacy, radicalism and considerable poignancy of his work.

Some of Welles’
uncompleted films are as famous as other directors’ masterpieces – The Other Side Of The Wind, and Don Quixote, which he shot on and off in
Spain in the 1950’s. In The Well,
documentary filmmaker Kristian Petri posits himself as a successor to Thompson,
the investigating reporter in Kane,
traveling through Spain in search of the secret of Welles’ love for the country
(he shot several films there in addition to Quixote,
paid extended visits throughout his life, and decreed in his will that his
ashes be buried in the titular well, located in a famous bullfighter’s private
garden) and perhaps of greater insight into the director’s fragmented career.
As he freely admits in his voiceover, the most compelling parallel may be
between Petri’s dawdling, travelogue-like approach to this project, and Welles’
almost compulsive inability to knuckle down and finish anything (vividly
described here by Jess Franco, his assistant for a time, and later himself the
antithesis of Welles as a mega-prolific genre director). Petri comes across as
naively earnest, ultimately concluding (underwhelmingly, obviously) that Welles
was “a riddle with no conclusive answer’; he also blows his film’s most
attainable prospect of true distinction by failing to show us very much of the
copious recently unearthed footage shot by Welles in Spain. Even the legendary Quixote is seen here only in a few
grainy fragments.

Still, the film is
fascinating for all those who revere Welles. He was fascinated by bullfighting,
and occasionally thought of making a movie about it, captivated in particular
by the tragedy of its structure, exemplified by the bull’s central “innocence.”
Ultimately, he concluded that a film on the subject could “never outstrip
reality...it would merely degrade it.” Which resonates with so much of Welles’
work, built around characters of extreme, wanton flaws and yet unquestionable
grandeur, observed with perhaps the most tender, intricate tenderness in all of
cinema.

L’Enfer (Danis Tanovic)

This
is Tanovic’s first film since winning the foreign film Oscar for No Man’s Land, based on a script that
might have been destined for Krzysztof Kieslowski (of The Decalogue and the Three
Colours trilogy), had he lived. It’s an overstuffed melodrama, tracking the
anguish of three sisters; one with a cheating husband, another in a hopeless
love affair, the third simply unfulfilled and hollow. The theme of absent or
errant fathers is central to the structure, with past errors and betrayals
replayed from one generation to the next. And the women react in turn,
sometimes by tying down the hatches and doing all possible to hold steady, but
sometimes more drastically. As one of the three makes clear in a presentation
on Medea: “under extreme pressure
women will ultimately explode...and children end up in pieces.”Add all of that together, and it seems that
modern life must be a hell indeed.

I
watched Kieslowki’s Red/White/Blue
again recently, and came away uncertain that the director for all his ambition
possessed a very coherent theory of modern existence. But he created
astonishing networks of allusion and connection, was thrillingly alert to the
currents in modern Europe, and was subtle enough in his evocation of the divine
and the mystical that it never seemed utterly contrived. By comparison, L’Enfer, although beautifully made in a
formal sense, seems much more conventional and ingratiating. Tom Tykwer also
took on left over Kieslowski material a few years ago with Heaven, and produced an oddly distant, academic work. Tanovic does
a warmer and subtler job, but it surely seems simpler in this version than the
wily old master would have allowed.

As Beasts of the Southern Wild was
starting, the people behind us suddenly broke into a flurry of anxious
whispering, as they realized this wasn’t The
Dark Knight Rises (I guess the poster on the way in must have been obscured
by the big bag of popcorn). They left in a hurry, but the incident was rather
useful in provoking a train of thought on the disparity in contemporary
American myth-making. The one that gets all the attention and the financial
love, of course, is the Batman movie – an enormous corporate investment,
knowingly packaged and positioned to provoke an audience frenzy, violently asserting
its seriousness by drawing on prevailing insecurities, sure enough of its
impregnability that it need acknowledge the opening-night mass murder in
Colorado merely by delaying the box office results and canceling a few parties
(gestures so cynically flimsy that they seem to me morally much inferior to
just doing nothing). If there’s any meaningful engagement in there with modern
anxieties and needs, it’s limited to what’s handed down from the manipulative
gods at the top of a cold, calculating mountain; audiences can flatter
themselves they’re in the presence of a cultural phenomenon, but they might as
well kneel down in front of MacDonald’s.

Beasts of the Southern
Wild

As a counterpoint,
Beasts of the Southern Wild is the
most intimate of fantasies. Even as you’re watching it, you can feel the
filmmakers crafting and refining it; it deliberately resists the potentially limiting,
closed-end perfection of a fully “polished” film. The director Benh Zeitlin is
from New York, but has lived in New Orleans for several years, and as a recent
article in Film Comment put it, set
out to make a film that resembled “a massive community art project.” At the
centre of this community he put a 6-year-old girl called Hushpuppy, living with
her drunken, disengaged father Wink in a fringe community called “the Bathtub.”
A storm rises up, seemingly prompted by the dislodging of the polar ice caps,
and the water level rises cataclysmically, causing the residents to be
evacuated to a government facility (a “fish tank without water” as she
describes it); their desire to reclaim their home intertwines with the advance
of several massive hog-like beasts, long-frozen and dormant.

Even that synopsis
tells you that the film draws heavily on memories of Hurricane Katrina and the
well-documented disruptions and injustices that followed, while consciously
busting through the parameters of quasi-documentary, or even normally-grounded
fiction. In that same article, Zeitlin said: “The movie is sort of pushing past
realism all the time into this hyper-real place or this fantasy place, but
because all the pieces are so organically found and every element is built so
organically, I think it sort of keeps it in realism in this way that is really
important, so that it doesn’t drift away from what people can relate to.” The
breathless nature of that statement, with its two sort-ofs, alerts you to the
project’s earnestness and potential over-preciousness. But I think Zeitlin’s
sense of the work’s internal rhythms and proportions is keen enough that he
avoids most potential pitfalls.

Makes me feel cohesive

The film is
crammed with odd, memorable fragments: the initial depiction of Hushpuppy’s
life, imagining her dead mother’s voice emanating from her clothes, which
remain strewn around the house, and concocting a terrible-looking meal out of
soup and cat food, lighting the stove with a blow torch; her and Wink’s boat,
built out of found elements prominently including the back-end of a trailer; a
later memory of the mother – as recalled by Wink - as a woman so steaming hot
that she could boil water just by walking past it (duly visualized, in the
literal way of a young girl’s imagination); an encounter with a sea captain who
subsists on chicken biscuits and has kept all the wrappers (“The smell makes me
feel cohesive”) and any number of proud, defiant images of the little girl, who
in the latter stages acquires a like-minded posse. The connective material
between these is sometimes rather murky, and you can feel the relative poverty
of means, like trying to cover up cracks in the fabric with mud and smoke. But
in this case, it enhances the film’s authenticity as personal testimony; the
“imperfections” in the wider imagining reflect the limits of the protagonists’
understanding and capacity for action.

In this vein, Hushpuppy’s voice-over narration perhaps relies
too much on bromides about how “the entire universe depends on everything
fitting together just right,” versions of which are repeated more times than I
tried counting, and which provide the film’s final note – a proud assertion of
one’s inviolable place in the cosmos, whatever the obstacles. Put another way,
the film, for all of its oddities, has a distinct overlap with the “triumph of
the human spirit” tales that crop up throughout American cinema.

Clichés
of cinema

The problem with this aspect of it, perhaps, is that it
doesn’t pay sufficient attention to the institutions and forces that make it so
tough for the human spirit in the first place. The movie clearly has a
political undertone – it presents the levee as a structure that protects the
monied interests lying on the other side, and the flip side of the Bathtub
community’s internal camaraderie and coherence is that it seems to be free of
any external intervention; one would hesitate to characterize the people as
beasts running wild, but the title forces it on us as a point of reference,
until the catastrophe strikes and the wheels of disaster control start turning
(because of course, in the delirious official morality, it’s fine if people
live in poverty and deprivation, but a moral affront if they perish in
something that looks dramatic on TV). And by the way, although Hushpuppy and
her father are black, that’s not true of the entire community: the issue is one
of class, environment and opportunity, not simply race.

Writing on Deadspin.com, Tim Grierson said that
although he likes the film, it’s a “model of the worst clichés of contemporary
art-house cinema” – in his words, it fetishizes “authenticity,” it tries way
too hard to be gritty, it treats poverty as something noble, it confuses simple
characters for memorable ones, and it touches on real-life events without
saying anything about them. Unfortunately, Grierson’s articulation of these
points is so poor that it’s hard even to allow a token acknowledgment that one
can see what he means. The same website’s review of The Dark Knight Rises gushed: “It is a powerful, riveting action
movie, full of dread and weight and pain and looming apocalypse. It is an
amazing accomplishment to have created this whole dark, sad universe and turned
it into an insanely popular franchise.” Well, maybe that’s amazing, or maybe it
just embodies the worst clichés of mainstream perception, how we’re meant to be
more interested in someone else’s overblown dark, sad universe than in trying
to engage with our own.

Friday, August 10, 2012

This is the first of Jack Hughes’ reports from the 2005
Toronto Film Festival.

Breakfast
on Pluto (Neil Jordan)

Neil Jordan has been directing films now for over
twenty years, but I somehow still think of him as being relatively new. This is
partly a compliment insomuch as it speaks to the sense of boyish reinvention
that underlies much of his work, from Angel
through The Crying Game through The Butcher Boy to The Good Thief, not to mention the Hollywood stint that culminated
in Interview with a Vampire. He
started as a writer and has continued to publish periodically, and his films have
always evidenced a literary sensibility. This is of course a common way of
denigrating directors whose works appear to lack that cinematic je ne sais quoi, and I must admit I
share that same adverse predisposition - it's as if a literary facility,
founded in the intimate arrangement of words and phrases, were generally at
odds with the more fluid technology of cinema. This is too trite though, for
Jordan's films are highly intuitive and able, and in any event, the notion of a
man with a movie camera, imposing his personality on celluloid through sheer
force of will, is no more than a pipe dream, particularly given the
infrastructure that surrounds even a medium-budgeted production. Still, the
truth is that it matters little to the appreciation of any particular Jordan
film whether or not you’ve seen any of those that preceded it, something that
impedes the thrill of bearing witness to evolving artistry.

Breakfast on
Pluto continues the pattern, following the life of an Irish boy who would
rather have been born a girl, and whose abstracted take on life helps him in
navigating personal travails galore, as well as fraught encounters with the
IRA, British police, and so forth. In the end, of course, he forges a stable if
highly unconventional present where all the loose ends of the past are neatly
arranged. The film has lots of flash and glam and evocation of seedy locales
and edge-of-center behaviour, and is again confidently cinematic and
consistently sensitive (although I could have done without the whimsical
talking robins). Cillian Murphy gives a well-sustained study in chronic
feyness, surrounded by guest stars such as Bryan Ferry as a bag of sleaze. The
programme book called the film “electrifying, carnivalesque” which is not
inappropriate, if you focus on the inherently short-lived, transient nature of
those qualities.

Manderlay
(Lars von Trier)

I
wouldn’t strenuously disagree with the common list of faults identified by
critics last year in Lars von Trier’s Dogville:
pretentiousness, repetition, lazy point scoring. Even so, this film about a
woman’s humiliation in a small Depression-era village is stylistically so
fascinating (it was shot in its entirety inside a Swedish warehouse, with no
sets) that a reasonably minded viewer should have been able to stay with it
through these challenges. And it’s clearly a major piece of political cinema,
even if one’s assessment in that regard is inevitably going to be coloured by
personal preconceptions.

Von
Trier conceived Dogville as the first
in a trilogy about America, of which Manderlay
is the second.It has the same
stripped-down style, faux-archaic voiceover narration, and potentially
hectoring approach to narrative and significance. After leaving the village at
the end of the previous film, Grace (now played by Bryce Dallas Howard) comes
across an unreconstructed slave plantation where she declares freedom for all,
and installs herself as a benign temporary despot, to oversee the transition to
democracy. If her powers of persuasion and rational argument fail, she has a
coterie of her father’s gangsters on hand to back her up. Most of the movie
follows the ups and downs of this social experiment, and the prototype-like
quality of the visuals meshes well with the content. The parallels with the
current situation in Iraq, and with countless other episodes in American
history – or even its entire history,
depending how coercive and duplicitous you take the governing ideology to be –
are obvious, and although these parallels sometimes seem to come too easily to
be that valuable, it’s perpetually surprising how much complexity von Trier
squeezes from the mix. The film’s digressions into sexuality may be even more
provocative, although I’m not sure his handling of that aspect is quite as
assured.

Ultimately,
the film’s main ingredient may well be sheer audacity, but at least von Trier’s
applying himself to far more worthwhile ends than the average egomaniac
director (a value judgment on my part, obviously). When I looked back the other
day, I was surprised how often I had one of his films in my top ten for a given
year. His Dancer in the Dark was a
potentially harrowing tale of suffering, interrupted by several large-scale
musical numbers; it’s a deeply contradictory, ambiguous film, with the lead
performance by Bjork ably encapsulating those traits. Before that, his film The Idiots hung out with a group of
middle-class professionals who’ve become preoccupied with “finding their inner
idiot.” Notorious among other things for its orgy sequence, it certainly
possessed a certain congruence of form and subject, and had a squirming comic
effectiveness. Even earlier, his TV series The
Kingdom was a mesmerizing ahead of its time melodrama. I think the only von
Trier work to have failed to make much of an impact on me was Breaking The Waves, still probably his
greatest consensus success. Still, in the recent documentary The Five Obstructions, he was fairly
honest about showing himself to be smug and borderline insufferable, and most
critics do not like Manderlay as much
as I do. It would not be surprising, before too long, if he simply wore out his
welcome.

Adam’s Apples
(Anders Thomas Jensen)

This
Danish film, about a convict released into a sort of halfway house overseen by
an eccentric priest, has a fairly terrific first half. I don’t usually make a
point of citing the names of unknown actors, but Mads Mikkelsen as the priest
pulls off a characterization of great originality; convinced that the Devil is
out to get him (a theory somewhat borne out by his immense
personal bad luck), but indefatigably resourceful at every turn. Later on the
film takes on more than it can handle – matters get cartoonishly violent, or
else overly explicit in other ways, and it ends up as a bizarre and somewhat off-putting
exercise in, I suppose, magic realism. The programme book claims that the film’s
visual style evokes “Bergman, Dreyer and Tarkovsky,” but if anyone seriously
agrees with that, I will take on Adam’s bet from the film and bake them an
apple cake.

Sunday, August 5, 2012

In the 1970’s, the
big three of American comedy were Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, and Neil Simon.
Simon didn’t act and direct like the other two, but made up for it in
productivity – during that decade, twelve films were based either on his plays
or on his original screenplays, and he was nominated three times for an Oscar
(without ever winning). When I was first getting into movies at the end of that
decade, I saw a lot of Simon’s films – they were usually TV-friendly and therefore
easily accessible, and they usually starred actors I liked, such as Jack Lemmon
and Walter Matthau. Of course, judged by the standards of that era (which were
pretty damn high) they didn’t seem like particularly important films, but I
would frantically mine American cinema for workable clues to adulthood, and it
seemed to me I was more likely to turn out like a Neil Simon character than,
you know, a Scorsese one. This was a broadly correct prediction, although I’m
happy to say I’m probably less neurotic than most of his people (let alone
Scorsese’s).

Willie and Al

The Sunshine Boys was one of my
favourites, because it intersected with another of my objects of fascination,
the textures and structures of classic American showbiz – for example, I liked
the idea of being the kind of person who read Variety, and indeed I subscribed to it for many years, for as long
as it retained any faint smell of its past folk-lorish self. It depicts Willie
Clark and Al Lewis, who were partners for decades in a successful vaudeville act,
until they broke up in acrimony; as the play begins, they haven’t spoken for
over a decade. Willie’s nephew, an agent, gets them a booking on a TV salute to
comedy’s golden age: they can do the show on autopilot, as long as they can
stand being in the same room as each other.

The movie was
directed by Herbert Ross in 1975, and starred Matthau and George Burns, a
now-classic combination. Matthau was actually twenty-four years younger than
his co-star, but it didn’t matter a bit, when his portrayal of the aging Willie
was so entertainingly broad and stylized. Burns in contrast kept it dry and
tight, and ended up winning an Oscar. The play is currently on stage here, at
Soulpepper’s theatre in the Distillery District, and I went to see it the other
week. It stars Kenneth Welsh and Eric Peterson – no doubt beloved Canadian
veterans, but not because of their long association with dumb jokes and
slapstick. Peterson seems like too small a personality to embody Willie’s
sloppy charisma, and Welsh’s attempt to channel Burns too often comes across as
mere inertia. You never really feel either how they could have worked together
so effectively, or fallen out so savagely (it’s obvious that Willie’s stated
reasons – that Al kept poking him with his finger and spitting on him while
pronouncing words starting with “T” – are the tip of an iceberg, but we surely
ought to feel the shape of that iceberg more fully).

Comic timing

Also, given the
emphasis in the play on comic timing and delivery, the pacing is too slack – I
kept registering moments where director Ted Dykstra should have told them not
to take a pause (especially ironic in a play which explicitly talks about the
timing of jokes. For my money, Jordan Pettle as the nephew gives the best
performance in the play: although it’s a much less showy part, everything he
says in it sounds natural and unforced (and more nuanced than Richard Benjamin
was in the movie).

Still, I enjoyed
sitting there and ticking off the lines, as well as waiting to see if everyone
in the perilously ancient audience would make it through to the end. The
program book gamely argues that “hidden in the hilarity are real fears about
aging, being left behind, and being relegated to history…we root for them, even
as we laugh at their pride, their blindness and their need to be right.” Well,
I suppose that’s right, but not much more than these “real fears” might be
detected in the subtext to any
depiction of older people. The play undercuts any claims to emotional reality
through a rather opportunistic approach to Willie and Al’s frailties, dialing
their senility up or down as the context requires (part of the movie’s
achievement is in making this coherent – we feel how the two of them rouse each
other to function more effectively, even if it’s just for the purpose of doling
out abuse). I doubt it’s one of Simon’s most deeply felt works – it’s more
about executing a concept than exploring one.

Not what it used to be

Coincidentally,
the play has also recently been revived in London’s West End, possibly with a
Broadway transfer ahead: that version stars Danny DeVito and Richard Griffiths,
and supposedly digs a little more deeply into the characters. The reviews for
the Soulpepper version were a bit flat – it didn’t seem like a lot of the
critics really saw much point to it. Indeed, if Soulpepper did too much of this
kind of thing, they might as well just convert the whole place into a dinner
theatre. But on the other hand, Neil Simon didn’t attain his status just by
being glib and prolific: his body of work encompasses a vast examination of
love and discord and anxiety and loss, and since his heyday wasn’t so long ago,
it’s tempting to think it can speak to us now. Or at least, to the privileged
group of us who can afford theatre tickets, to be blunt about it.

And yet, when I
was watching the movie again, a few days after seeing the play, I kept
registering how far away it seems. Of course, this particular Simon work was
always going for that – the opening credits run over a montage of old
vaudeville bits, followed by a nice opening shot of a now desolate marquee;
soon after that Matthau and Benjamin walk past the old Ed Sullivan theatre,
dirty and derelict in 1975, but nowadays cleaned-up and shining every night as
the venue for the Letterman show. It’s progress, of course, but Letterman
doesn’t pretend the show has the same heart and kick it used to, and so it goes
with New York, and with so much else. The movie of The Sunshine Boys gains from dirt and clutter and the weight of
memories and traditions, like waiting every Wednesday for Variety to find out who died, a vigil which by its nature provides
a measure of commemoration, even if you can’t remember who the people you’re
commemorating actually were. Of course the present isn’t what it used to be,
but equally as depressing, neither is the past.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).